Scholars of early medieval China have long viewed an understanding of the Liang dynasty as incidental to an appreciation of serious literary history, and they point to Liang Palace Style poetry as both the cause and the consequence of the dynasty's famed decadence. In Beacon Fire and Shooting Star: The Literary Culture of the Liang, Xiaofei Tian embarks on an important and needed project: to reexamine this much-maligned period, especially its poetry, and to expose the weighty underside of its alleged superfluousness. Putting her study of the period in a broad historical context, the author has two main concerns: to call attention to the cultural vibrancy of the Liang and to expose the ideologies that have obscured the period's true cultural significance.

Divided into eight chapters, the work proceeds in a roughly chronological manner. Chapter 1 takes up the political and cultural legacy of Emperor Wu (Liang Wudi, r....

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